Monday, September 30, 2013

Its been an incredibly busy and frustrating few months with a lot of interesting lessons learned. The most interesting of the lessons was defining a major difference between prfessionals and amatuers.

At one poinnt I spent a day helping a friend to fit a kitchen. Now this guy does this for a living. He is an extremely skilled and competent craftsman. At one point he was cutting some very nice worktop and the laminate broke at one end, snagged by the saw tooth, leaving a large and very obvious triangle of bare wood exposed. As an amateur my immediate response was to panic and figure that's £60 quid of worktop to replace. Not so the professional. My friend worked out the depth of the tiles and splashback that would sit on the worktop, measured the overlap at the front then took a couple of centimetres off the back with a circular saw and within 20 minutes you would never have known there was a problem. "Its about what the customer can see, not what they cant." He told me. Thats when I realised professionals mess up but they deal with it and amateurs just start again. Applied to art this is especially key. Its so easy to trash a drawing or painting because of it's errors and start again and again and never really finish anything. You never realise that often you are the only one seeing the errors. So with that in mind I'm stepping up productivity. First a weekly diary/journal strip and then looking too expand further.